Want to learn Aperture?

Read Aperture 2 by Ben Long, Richard Harrison, and Orlando Luna.

I’m working through this Apple Pro Training Series guide for the second time and I am still picking up new tips and tricks. The book is very well written and provides plenty of real life examples to help you understand how and when to use the powerful image management and enhancement tools included in Aperture. The book also comes with a DVD containing the images used in the text as well as lessons that provide over 20 hours of training. After completing the book you can, if you are so inclined, become Apple Pro certified by taking the Aperture certification exam at an Apple training center.

If you want to take full advantage of Aperture 2, this is the guide to follow.

Oops! Another Reason to Shoot in RAW

As the volunteer bench coach, score keeper, and self-appointed photographer for my son’s little league team, I’m flirting with photographic disaster. Last week, I followed my usual routine – balancing camera on scorebook for 6 innings and shooting whenever possible. However, as I began to download the day’s images into my Aperture library, I quickly realized that sometime during the first inning I had inadvertently bumped the control dial on my 40D causing a switch from aperture priority to manual exposure. Almost all of the subsequent images were grossly overexposed. I know what you are thinking – I should have noticed this immediately while reviewing the images on the camera’s LCD…oops!

Rather than send the images to the digital graveyard, I decided to experiment with Aperture and Photoshop to see how much information could be salvaged. After adjusting the exposure and levels in Aperture, I used the Recovery and Highlight sliders to bring some detail back into the image. I then opened each image in Photoshop Elements (using Aperture’s roundtrip feature) and duplicated the background layer twice. The first duplicate layer was converted to black and white and the second duplicate layer was changed to either a Multiply, Color Burn, or Linear Burn blend mode. Here is an example of the results:

While this is not destined for the cover of SI, it does have an interesting pop art feel and it demonstrates the incredible amount of information that is stored in your RAW files.

RAW, Aperture, digital processing

Technorati Tags: RAW, Aperture, digital processing

Digital Film Tools – Light!

Here’s another nifty Aperture plug-in to check out. Light! from Digital Film Tools is useful for adding light and shadows to images. The plug-in is pretty straightforward and is capable of producing some cool effects. Here are a couple of examples:

RAW FILE

Aperture/PS Elements

DFT Light!

RAW FILE

APERTURE/PS ELEMENTS/DFT LIGHT!

Technorati Tags: Aperture, DFT LIght, plug-in, Photoshop Elements

HDR with Aperture and Photomatix

High dynamic range (HDR) images maintain detail in both the highlights and the shadows, often resulting in a striking amount of definition as compared to the original image(s). I have been experimenting with HDR images using a combination of Aperture and the Photomatix software. The process is straightforward – choose an image having a large range of luminescence values and vary its exposure using Aperture’s RAW converter. Depending on the image, two underexposures and two overexposures (0.5 EV each) or one underexposure and one overexposure (1.0 EV each) are a good starting point. The exposure-compensated versions, along with the original (0 EV) are loaded into Photomatix and an HDR image is generated using either an exposure blending or a tone mapping method. The resulting image can then be tweaked to your liking using a variety of value sliders within Photomatix. While HDR images are technically supposed to be constructed from a series of in-camera exposures, I’ve found that the Aperture generated exposures are a good substitute.

ORIGINAL IMAGE

HDR IMAGE (from +1, 0, -1 EV exposures), slight cropping

Technorati Tags: HDR, aperture, high dynamic range

Geotag your images with Maperture

Ubermind has released a new Aperture plug-in that allows you to easily geotag your images using Google Maps.  Geotagging is all the rage as of late and Maperture will allow you to keep pace without a significant interruption to your workflow.  Best of all – it’s free!

Technorati Tags: aperture, Maperture, geotag, photography

PS I heard about this plug-in on the This Week in Photography podcast.  Check it out at http://twipphoto.com!

PSS If you don’t have Aperture, you can purchase it from B&H